The number of television channels which are available to a viewer has increased considerably with the advent of satellite television, cable television and digital terrestrial television. As a result it is hard for a viewer to select a channel to watch and there may be circumstances where a viewer, or group of viewers such as a family, wants to watch more than one channel. One solution to this is for the viewer to manually switch between the channels; however this is inefficient and may be ineffective, particularly in the case of unpredictable events such as goals in a soccer match, where the viewer may miss the interesting event by switching at the wrong time. Another solution, which enables a viewer to watch more than one television channel at the same time, is picture in picture (PIP) technology. PIP, however, is limited in the number of channels which can be displayed simultaneously and is also visually distracting.
Event notification systems have been developed which use RSS (Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) feeds, SMS (short message service) messages or email to notify subscribers to breaking news, sporting results etc. In these systems, the notifications are triggered manually by a news agency or other service provider.
The embodiments described below are not limited to implementations which solve any or all of the disadvantages of known event notification systems.